• • • and now to rescue Peter
PERSONAL COLUMN GILES PLAYFAIR
This is by way of beiing an appeal to the National Theatre. But a word or two of ex- planation to begin with.
Among the grown-ups, I take it, there are very few who think Peter Pan a play worth bothering about. After all, whatever its faults and virtues, it is 'undoubtedly theatrical in the nineteenth century sense; and this sort of theatricality has commonly come to be con- sidered contemptible and, worse, embarrassing. Peter Pan only survives because, for some reason which no critic seems able to explain very well, the children still like it.
I happen to be- someone who mourns the passing of plush-and-gold theatricality from the theatre, though I don't know quite why. There wasn't much of it left back in the 'twenties, in my earliest playgoing days; and my father, who always told me that Irving was a laughably bad actor, was a producer in revolt against the bondage of the proscenium arch. Perhaps my taste is owed to maternal influence, for my mother was trained for the stage in the nineteenth century discipline, and she was the very first Peter; or. rather, she understudied Nina Boucicault, and played the part at matinees. Anyway, I can still get some residual enjoyment out of what passes annually for a production of this work, which to my mother was almost sacred.
But—and this is the point—I don't believe I have ever- seen a performance of the play that Barrie wrote. I don't believe anybody has, and I include such survivors as there may be of the public that saw the original produc- tion. That, I suspect, was in some ways more remote from anything Barrie intended or imagined than productions of recent years have become. Not, I hasten to add, in every way. One may feel sure that, like all the early pro- ductions which Dion Boucicault meticulously directed, it was far better acted; du Maurier's Hook has certainly never been matched since (for a wonderfully evocative description of this performance, see Daphne du Maurier's Gerald). By comparison, this year's Hook (Alastair Sim) is not a character but a clown: an amusing enough clown, because Sim is a technically skilled actor, but nothing more. Boucicault's production was free, too, of numer- ous 'business' sillifications which have trans- formed the pirate ship scene, in particular, from drama into a shapeless romp, though mercifully the ultimate absurdity of introducing the dog to the Neverland and flying it off at the end has been abandoned this year. Nevertheless, the original production may on balance have been closer to pantomime. Even the Lost Boys were impersonated by amply clad grown women, and Peter was got up to look like an overdressed Robin Hood.
Did Barrie ever want this? Nobody who troubles to read the published version of the play, with its minutely detailed stage directions, can possibly suppose that he did. But the pub- lished version didn't appear until many years after the play had become a firmly established annual event in the theatre, with Peter a part that every young, or not-so-young, star actress longed to have a go at. One must remember that the work was considered an utterly revo- lutionary form of Christmas or children's entertainment when it was first written; in fact,
Tree, after he had read the script, said that Barrie had gone 'quite mad.' It seems reason- able to infer, therefore, that too startling a breach with the traditions of pantomime could not be risked, and that the resultant compro- mise included, notably, the engagement of a principal boy and principal girl, so that at least some semblance of, say, Prince Charm- ing and Cinderella might be retained. At any rate, Barrie's tragic little boy, dressed, in so far as he is dressed at all, in 'cobwebs and ashes,' with baby teeth like pearls to gnash at all grown-ups, became a show part for a succession of male impersonators in tights.
Some of them, of course, have been less ludicrously miscast than others. Barrie's favourite (I believe) was Jean Forbes-Robert- son; and she did at least appear to be an overgrown sprite as opposed to an overgrown (and often buxom) tomboy. But neither she nor any other Peter I have ever seen has done anything but obscure the youngness, the heart- lessness and the deep pathos of the charac- ter.
So I come to my plea that Peter Pan should be put on by the National Theatre. Not as a
Christmas entertainment—there is no reason why the annual charade shouldn't continue for as long as there's an audience for it—but as a play that adult audiences may at last see and judge for themselves. I don't ask for its theatricality, the dramatic trickery of its period, to be disguised; still less, for it to be re- interpreted in terms of the 'sixties, whatever that might mean. On the contrary, I want a reversion to the original text, and an elimination of all the supposed modernisations and music-hall nonsenses that have crept into it over the years.
My choice of director for Peter Pan—perhaps this is an extravagant hope—would be the man who better than anyone else alive understands the theatre for which Barrie and Pinero wrote. Could he be tempted—Charles Chaplin, I mean? He would, I feel, have a particular em- pathy with the play, and I believe that years ago Barrie tried to persuade him to be Peter him- self in a silent movie. But where I'm convinced innovation must begin is in finding a real boy for the part; a waif-and-stray, a sort of Jackie Coogan, wearing practically nothing, except, perhaps, a toy sword round his waist.
Not an easy quest, I grant; and I'm aware of the special difficulty that any untrained boy actor would have with the `Do you believe in fairies?' scene. Yet here again, though one must suspect that Barrie included the scene for the sake of mere back-row-of-the-gallery effect, there is nothing in his stage direction to suggest that he intended a lusty-voiced actress to approach the footlights and address the audience directly, which is pantomime stuff.. What he visualised (or says he visualised) was a bewildered little boy who flings out his arms in an appeals to children he cannot see and does not know are there; and the boy might as well do this with his back to the audience.
But Peter Pan is not simply a play about Peter. It's a play, surely, about the chasm between children and adults, and unless one can be shown this chasm, the play has no real dramatic meaning. The grown-up characters must, therefore, be made to live rather than be codded or hardly defined as they've come to be. Hook, in particular, is a part for a virtuoso, and if there was ever an actor equipped to challenge du Maurier's supremacy in it I should think it is Olivier. Du Maurier, let it be remembered, was not squeamish about frightening the children. In his daughter's words, 'When Hook first paced his quarter- deck . . . even big boys of twelve were known to reach for their mother's hand in the friendly shelter of the boxes.'
There are other grown-up parts as histrioni- cally demanding as they can be rewarding: Smee, for example, and Mrs Darling, which calls for the sort of bravura performance Googie Withers could give it, and Mr Darling. (I am sorry to disappoint Brigid Brophy and others who have perceived deep significance in the impersonation of Hook and Mr Darling by the same actor. The significance is econo- mic, not psychological. Barrie didn't ask for the parts to be doubled. They weren't in the original production, and, as, a matter of fact, they aren't in the present one.) One last word: Barrie never wrote an end- ing to the play, or, rather, he never dramatised it. This was doubtless because the only pos- sible ending is unhappy—unhappy both for the boy who would not grow up and the rest of us who have to: an ending, therefore, considered commercially out of the question. But it exists in descriptive form. In fact, there was a stab at using it when Mary Martin appeared as Peter in a musical version of the play produced on Broadway some years ago; and this provided the one redeeming feature in what was otherwise the most grotesque of all the travesties of Barrie's work throughout the years. Except for 'Peter Pan on Ice.' Doesn't the National Theatre owe us 'Peter Pan on Stage'?
Previous page
